A Mirror Mended (Fractured Fables #2)(32)

I add another clumsy sentence or two about a princess who grew into a queen who became a villain and then, eventually, a hero. I spin the book to face Eva and slide it across the table. “Your turn.”

She reads the page and her face goes tight and still. A muscle moves in her jaw. “I don’t know what happens next.”

I twirl the feather. “It’s your story. You tell me.”

I can’t tell if she understands what I’m trying to do, or if she thinks the whole thing is some sort of inane therapy exercise, but when she takes the pen, her hand is shaking. She sits for a while, rolling the quill in her fingertips and staring at the page with a faint frown, before she begins to write.

It takes a lot longer than I expect it to. Eva pauses after every sentence to do some more staring and frowning. She blots out entire paragraphs and starts them over, often several times in a row. At one point she actually makes a motion as if she’s going to ball the page up and toss it away like a novelist in a bad movie, before apparently recalling that she’s writing in my favorite childhood book. She restrains herself to crossing out another paragraph.

I watch her, listening to the sound I can’t really hear, hoping for a future that doesn’t yet exist.

Night has fallen by the time she finishes. She doesn’t set her pen down in triumph or anything, but I know the story is done because I feel it. The thrumming stops. The air changes. It’s like someone has opened an invisible door and let in a breeze that smells like frost and fresh apples.

Eva gives a little sigh and un-hunches herself from the page.

“Looks good,” I say over her shoulder, and the queen startles so badly she chokes. Apparently she hadn’t noticed me getting up, rummaging for candles, asking three or four times if she was hungry, and eventually giving up and standing behind her. I thump her good and hard on the back. “Needs a title, though.”

When Eva stops coughing, she flips back to the beginning of her story and runs her finger across the empty space above the words once upon a time. “I don’t know what to call it.” Her voice is hoarse and low. “I’ve never done this before.”

I drag my chair around the table so I can sit catty-corner to her. “Well, it’s your call, but the Grimms generally named their stories after the protagonist.”

She goes still beside me. Only her eyes move, meeting mine. I assure myself that it’s just the candles that make them look that way, bright and burning. Nobody’s eyes are full of literal light; nobody’s gaze actually smolders.

She writes a name without speaking.

I read the word, pretending not to notice the pair of watery tear drops blotting the page beside it. “You know I was just teasing when I called you that. You can choose any name you want.”

“I have.” Her tone might manage to be imperious, if there weren’t tears in it. “How do we know if it … worked?”

I don’t answer. I slide the last shard of mirror across the table, the one Prim plucked from my hair, and fit it neatly into the frame. Our faces look up at us from the surface, fissured and cracked, but exactly as we are: a skinny, sharp-chinned woman in a dirty T-shirt and a hard, hungry queen with a surprising number of freckles.

The only difference is what’s behind us. There are no whitewashed walls in the mirror. It’s distant and blurred, but I think I see a rich, rolling landscape, a stone shape that might be a castle. A new story, unfolding around us in all directions.

I take Eva’s hand and place it gently on the mirror’s surface. Her fingers fall through the glass as if it’s an open window.

She doesn’t drag me into the space between worlds this time. She looks at me with a question in her eyes, and I shrug. “One more time can’t hurt, can it?”

Eva smiles. We fall together into the vast nowhere, where my imaginary body fights for air that doesn’t exist, where the only real thing is the heat of her hand holding tight to mine.





11


THIS IS, DEPENDING on how you count it, either my forty-ninth or fiftieth happily ever after, but I don’t mind. It turns out I’m not quite sick of them yet.

It shouldn’t be daylight for hours, but somehow we’ve arrived at that perfect moment just after dawn, when the air rushes away from the horizon and lays tall grasses low. The sunlight transforms the frost into dew and the dew into mist, which coils catlike around our skirts. There are trees surrounding us again, but they aren’t dark or tangled. They stand in long, neat lines, their branches spreading low. An orchard, at dawn.

Eva is turning in a slow, wary circle, as if she’s waiting for someone to leap out from behind a tree and shout, “Seize her!” No one does. Instead, the mist parts to reveal a pale stone castle standing on a distant hill. It’s not very big or grand—in castle terms, it might even be called modest—and there’s a shabbiness to it that suggests empty halls and unclaimed thrones. But it’s enough for Eva, I can tell. Her mouth falls open as she looks at it.

A throne of one’s own. A happily ever after fit for a queen. I have to remind myself forcefully that I’m not a queen or even a princess, and this story doesn’t belong to me.

I expect Eva to stride straight for the castle, but she turns back to me. Her smile is wide and young, almost giddy. There are no convenient candles to blame for the bright blaze of her eyes. “It’s better than I imagined.”